dcinput daily for Wed 26th April, 2006
Bre Pettis is officially a Rocketboom correspondant. Bre used to work for the Creature Shop here in London way before I did but we ended up meeting by chance over the interweb after the Shop closed down. When he came to London with his lovely girlfriend we met up with Kosso and Joe Twist whom I had by chance met previously. Bre is such an awesome guy and is one of the best video bloggers out there. I’m really happy for him!
Mark Nelson: “The use of the JPEG format is becoming so mired in patent snarls that it is quickly becoming an albatross around the necks of any companies doing imaging”.
Mark is worried about people developing things around standards such as JPEG-2000. I don’t know enough about what he’s talking about but something to keep an eye on considering the DCI adoption of the format as its standard.
Lots of interesting digital cinema things happening at NAB. I’d love to be posting about them but I’m just too busy at work. Great coverage over at Digital Cinema Matters. Also daily podcasts from fxguide.
fxguide have anounced their fxphd beta, a sort of online university specifically geared towards the visual effects industry. After registration you become a post grad and attend 3 courses a term of which there are 4 a year. There is a background fundamentals which is compulsory and then you can choose from many courses covering a wide variety of subjects: Toxic, After Effects, Shake, Final Cut Pro, Avid Express etc. You receive one 30 mins training video per week for each course.
“As you work through the video your professor is online to answer questions and guide you. There are practical files to download from real shots and projects- you can then compare your results with the final.
AND running along side fxphd is Creative Jobs Network recuitment - as you develop your reel and portfolio you have direct access to senior post recuiters the world over.”
Another interesting thing about it is that they are distributing the course material using Bit Torrent. It’s great to see some legal uses for this great technology and even better to see people actually trying to make money with it. Another Next Step for Bit Torrent. Class enrollement beguins 1st of May. It may be time to get a new pencil case.
One thing I note is that there do not seem to be any courses covering the more technical/engineering aspects of the industry. The sort of infrastructures that are required to support all the fabulous work that digial artists do are specialist and highly complex. Workflows and their implementation within a company and the management of enormous quantities of data are all very important aspects of the VFX world. It can be hard to find good people with the right skills for these roles.
Digitaler Film has an interesting flash movie thingy of how digital distribution works. It’s in German so no real clue as to what the guy is saying but liking the demo anyway. Here is his site through Google translate.
Avid anounce Avid Interplay: “The world’s first nonlinear workflow engine that fuses integrated asset management, workflow automation, and security control into a single system, delivering a business-wide workflow for postproduction and broadcast settings of any size”. It looks seriously cool. The real question is how well it integrates with 3rd party software. If you end up getting locked into Avid products it wouldn’t be so good.
April 26th, 2006 at 6:57 am
Hey Man, Thanks for the mad props. You’re the best! We had a great time hanging out with you too!
Bre
April 26th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
my comment about jpeg was of course a bit hyperbolic, it is the blogosphere after all.
but there is also a lot of realism in the alarm. imagine what would happen if the entire film industry converted to a single standard for digital distribution and display of films - spending literally billions of dollars - and then some yahoo shows up with a submarine patent that covers the technology. That patent holder could hold the entire industry up for a ton of money.
And what can the industry do to protect itself against this? Well, people will tell you that it’s simply a matter of due diligence - read the patents that are being granted.
Problem with this is that there are literally thousands of applicable patents being granted each year, and there are perhaps tens of thousands that are cloaked in the system - you don’t get to see them until they are granted.
It is high-stakes poker to adopt a new technology like this.
The only absolutely safe strategy would be to publish everything you are doing and then wait 25 years before using it!